Marketing your physician private practice online demands much more than a fancy website, according to Daniel E. Choi, MD, a spinal surgeon and founder of Spine Medicine and Surgery of Long Island. Promoting your practice needs to begin with building a comprehensive online home.
And a good online home is built on a strong online identity, he said, explaining his marketing tactics at a workshop on the business of medicine that was held ahead of the 2024 AMA Annual Meeting in June.
“The first thing you have to start off with is you have to have a good logo—a decent logo. And a nice logo doesn't cost thousands and thousands dollars. You don't have to go hire a designer for $10,000,” said Dr. Choi, who serves as alternate delegate for the AMA Private Practice Physicians Section. The section seeks to preserve the freedom, independence and integrity of private practice.
Using International consultants
Dr. Choi, with the assistance of design consultant website 99 Designs, found an economical way to sample design options from a variety of designers, he said. Early in 2021, he and his team sponsored a contest to see which international graphic designer could create the most effective logo. The contest cost about $900. The winner got $500.
“So, you can say, ‘This is what I want my logo to look like. These are the elements. I want it to look modern, sleek. I want to use these colors. I want to express vibrancy, certain mood words,’ and then they'll just do it.”
“That was one of the first things I did, even before I opened my doors.”
Photography was the next step. “We've done a photo shoot now twice. We did one a year and a half ago, six months into my practice starting. And then our practice grew tremendously in 2023,” he said. “Then we had the logo, we had all the photos, and that's where you start getting a very nice, modern-feeling, clean-looking website.”
Your website is the platform for a wide range of other media, he added, and the key to expanding your reach into a broader audience,
“You can't have this type of reach any other way. You can't even pay for it, I think. I was one of the first spinal surgery accounts on Instagram. I started in 2017. I was bored. I didn't have enough cases. I didn't have many patients in my practice, he said. Back then it was all plastic surgeons and dermatologists putting up before-and-after pictures” on the internet, he said.
In four video primers available from the AMA, the marketing and branding experts Rob Rosenberg and Donna Arbogast, of Springboard Brand and Creative Strategy in suburban Chicago, cover common issues that physician private practices encounter when implementing basic marketing strategies.
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These include identifying marketing advantages, conducting research to gauge community satisfaction, and using social media and other paid digital platforms. Each video is accompanied by these written primers that help physician private practices take their own steps toward a strong brand presence.
- Identifying your practice's marketing advantage (PDF).
- Conducting market research (PDF).
- Building trust (PDF).
- Basic digital strategies (PDF).
Day-in-the-life videos
Dr. Choi began with day-in-the-life videos on YouTube that demonstrated how his office and his practice worked—without graphic scenes of surgery.
“It's kind of ridiculous, but people love it. And so, I did one of these and it got 31,000 views,” he said. Another video, posted to Dr. Choi’s Instagram page, did even better, now surpassing 250,000 views.
Dr. Choi also learned how to integrate a variety of elements to enhance views. “There's ways and techniques to placing keywords on your website for you to be able to rank” better on search-engine results pages, he said, taking advantage of web stats his website publishers send the practice.
“We're trying to optimize for these terms, like “minimally invasive spine surgery,’ ‘Long Island,’ ‘spine surgery in Long Island,’ ‘spine specialists in Long Island, ‘Long Island spine specialist laser spine surgery’ so we're No. 1 in all of those whenever you search from,” he said.
Learn more from the brand mavens at Springboard with an education session that is part of the AMA Private Practice Simple Solutions series of free, open-access rapid-learning cycles that provide opportunities to implement actionable changes that can immediately increase efficiency in private practices.
The session, “Advanced Marketing and Branding for Private Practices,” is available to view on demand (registration required).
It takes astute clinical judgment as well as a commitment to collaboration and solving challenging problems to succeed in independent settings that are often fluid, and the AMA offers the resources and support physicians need to both start and sustain success in private practice.
